Mexico City circa 1969

 

Prolific would be an understatement to describe my photography. Just of my ,I have thousands and thousands of negatives and slides. Most are filed under year-date. Some of the earlier ones that I took of my Rosemary with our first daughter Alexandra, are in a separate ring binder that contains most of the photographs that I started taking in Austin, Texas in 1958. It was then that I bought a Pentacon-F single lens reflex made in what was then called Russian occupied Germany.

These days of idle living with my two cats, Niño and Niña I am attempting to put order into my photo files. I am not in the least concerned about a legacy, once I meet with my oblivion. It is really no different that vacuuming my house or feeding the cats.

But no matter how plain this task is I do run into photographs (in this case b+w negatives attached to a contact sheet) that have startled me as they are beautiful.

I do know that these pictures of Rosemary and Alexandra were taken at the time when the Mexican Olympics had happened. Rosemary called Alexandra “our Olympic Baby”.

Once I had started my career in Vancouver around 1977, as a magazine photographer, I learned the trick of seeing a contact sheet and immediately being able to identify the keepers.

The four pictures here have pen x-marks on the negative sleeve. This means I may have noticed them years ago. I have no memory of having done that nor if I ever printed them.

Looking at these today, 28 February, 2026 means that I am seeing them for the first time. As I obsessively read Jorge Luís Borges, I keep stating here that he wrote that every first time is followed by the exact first time.

Rosemary is now gone. She died on December 9, 2020 and Alexandra is now 58. This sentence is a first time and it will be followed by the same sentence, over and over.

When I took these photographs we lived in an extremely small and narrow house in the yet to be discovered Zona Rosa of Mexico City. My guess is that I shot these photographs at a nearby park. I do not know if I used that Pentacon-F or a “newer” Asahi Pentax S-3 that I bought used at Foto Rudiger in 1962.

I do know that I can pick up both cameras, they work beautifully today, and if I look through the viewfinder, my variation of the Julian Barnes’s AIM (autobiographical involuntary memory)  a voluntary one will immediately transport me to that first time that Rosemary and Ale faced my camera.

Such has been the pioneering work of Cartier-Bresson that the idea of taking street photographs in this 21^st century almost demands that they be taken in b+w.

For me street photographs, in most cases, are related to nostalgia. This means that I will happily take street photographs in the countries I have lived in, Argentina & Mexico. Taking them in Vancouver leaves me cold even in the summer.

I am placing here some photographs I took in Guanajuato, Mexico which I shot with my medium format Mamiya RB-67. This is not the sort of camera (it is heavy and bulky) that anybody might use for street photographs. It is difficult to take photographs on the sly. People will notice you pointing at them with this camera.

I sometimes tell my friends that my idea of hell is being subjected to see 100 street photographs in b+w.

Here are 3 in colour. Are they street photographs?

Guanajuato, Mexico -1962

 

 

Anita -

In my blogs I often write that I studied philosophy in an American College in Mexico City. I was studying to be an engineer (I failed electricity) and at the same time I was taking philosophy courses with a brilliant mind Ramón Xirau. While he started with Pre-Socratics and ended with Sartre I was quite obsessed with Plato and his idea of a perfect world that our senses could never see.

A few years ago because Rosemary and I had cats we had to constantly suffer their death. We soon discovered that the fastest cure to the grief of a dead cat was a brand new one. And, especially, if it was a middle-aged rescue from the SPCA. My take was that the new cat inherited that perfection that all felines have that I call “catness”.

Since I began to photograph unclothed women in the late 70s until just about one year ago, I realized that with the death of my Rosemary on December 9, 2010, that she was the only woman I was interested in and attracted to.

A photographer has to (that is my case) keep taking photographs.  Since I have really specialized in facing my camera on a person, I quickly discovered that I wanted to somehow get that perfect humanity (that Platonic one) that we humans all possess. After all, if I am me I cannot be someone else.

This led me to the idea, that while I have most always taken portraits with a sometimes severe eye contact into my lens, I had to go further.

Whenever I now have the chance of taking photographs of a woman I want to get that which she is and I am not.

In those past years of my life in Vancouver I often got (they stopped about a year ago) phone calls from women that I did not know who wanted me to take “different” photographs of them. That was the case of a woman called Anita who called me in 2010. She posed for me twice. Once was in our Kerrisdale living room. The second time, in that living room, and in my car, when she was visibly pregnant.

This century has brought us Brazilian (as in no hair down there) pornography in Twitter/X. There is a nasty profusion on red carpets and videos of women holding a mike to their mouth, wearing next to nothing and then they move their rear ends in every possible sinuous direction.

I see my photographs with all those bits and pieces showing as less offensive and almost elegant. They now do not follow was is called “community standards.

I looked through my contact sheets of Anita and I found these two that would not offend anybody and at the same time they show in spades Anita’s Platonic essence of a woman.

And to be clear if I were to photograph a trans woman I would do as here. Trans women, if they see themselves as women, they are so. 

Dreaming in that past century was something that as a photographer and occasional writer I could indulge with pleasure. I could go to just about any magazine or newspaper in Vancouver and see the editor without previous appointment.

In that last century I went to Charles Campbell  then editor of the Georgia Straight with the idea of doing a fashion spread with story by David Boswell (he of the Reid Fleming The World’s Toughest Milkman). I further suggested we use dancers from Ballet BC.

Because I was a friend of the Marble Arch Hotel owner, Tony Ricci, we used the finest room of this then sleazy hotel.

People with keen eyes might notice that in the second photograph there is a framed portrait of Vancouver poet Michael Turner. A few years before, I had photographed him in that room with a beautiful woman in black underwear lying on the bed behind him. I had been commissioned by the Toronto literary magazine, Quill & Quire to take the portrait. As soon as the magazine was published, I received a phone call from the editor who called to thank me. He told me that my photo had elicited the first complaint ever for his staid magazine.

Desire and Murder and Michael Turner at the Marble Arch 

Boswell’s scenario was about three women luring a man into the room and killing him with a snub-nosed .38 revolver.

And so it happened.